The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [64]
‘I’ll leave everything in the Map Room, then.’ I’d brought the dictation machine over, and it was heavy. She stood back reluctantly.
As I was lugging it through the long, dark passageway, with its old maps and engravings on the wall, I heard heels on polished wood. Mr Keiller came off the bottom of the stairs and round the corner and nearly collided with me. He was in a beautiful black suit and I thought again of film stars. He was maybe a bit old to be in the pictures but he had a lovely strong jaw and if he smiled his eyes crinkled like Errol Flynn’s. The fact he was so tall always made me feel a shy little thing. I could feel myself blushing.
‘Miss Robinson! What are you doing cowering in the passage?’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ I could hardly bring the words out because all I could think was what he’d said in that letter. ‘…various branches of the erotic impulse…’ I imagined long lean ladies, draped in cream silk, lying back while Mr Keiller stroked their rounded breasts and soft ivory skin for his studies, turning away now and then to say a few words into his dictation machine.
‘Oh, the letters.’ He’d seen the machine under my arm. ‘Come into the Library and I’ll sign them.’ He held open the door for me, and I had to pass under his arm, smelling the warm scent of expensive soap that came off him. Underneath was something darker, more bullish. It was nothing like the smell of Davey when we were snuggling with our backs to the stone and our fingers lacing like cat’s cradle while I tried to keep his hands somewhere this side of decency.
I stood while he leaned against the table and read the letters through before dashing off his signature on each. There was one to some old colonel that had written complaining because Mr Keiller wouldn’t let him bring a group to see the dig when it started.
‘Claimed I was placing him and his ghastly friends on a level with a cheerio coach party of trippers from the Black Country,’ said Mr K. ‘Which is exactly why I don’t want his type here. Frankly, I’d much rather have the trippers. Can’t stand snobbery.’
The shelves in the room were arranged to make six big bays, and held more books than I’d ever seen in one place, more than there were in the Boots Lending Library in Devizes. There were some by Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, but most were dusty old things you’d never want to read. One title leaped out on the nearest shelf–The Sexual Life of Savages–and I dropped my eyes quickly, feeling myself beginning to redden again.
Mr Keiller put the top back on his fountain pen. I’d the feeling he was laughing at me. ‘Interested in books, are you, Miss Robinson?’
‘I’m a member of the lending library.’
‘There are some here that should never be lent. Look at this one: seventeenth century. Belonged to the Bishop of Aush.’ He pulled a fat leatherbound book off the shelf. It didn’t look really old. I said so.
‘Because I’ve had it rebound, you ninny. It’s a classic of witchcraft.’ He pretended to cuff me with the book; his hand skimmed my hair. ‘L’Inconstance de Demons. The faithlessness of demons.’ He sighed, and handed me the letters. ‘Now there’s a lesson for us all. Don’t sell your soul–or, at least, don’t sell it cheap. Right you are, Miss Robinson. Pop them in the envelopes and deliver them to the post, if you would, on your way to see your young man.’
I felt myself go hot all over again. How could he know about me and Davey? And I’d been thinking of that, what we did by the stones, childish fumblings, comparing it to Mr Keiller and his studies, the dark secret things he did with ladies like Miss Chapman and, if gossip was to be believed, plenty of others, although he and Miss Chapman were supposed to be getting married.
‘I see I’ve hit bullseye,’ he said. ‘So pretty Miss Robinson is courting. We shall have to start calling you Heartbreaker Robinson from now on.’
I was too young